Video calling on computers, mobile phones and tablets is no longer the novelty it was even a few years ago. But such calls remain a rarity on your television. Never mind that some newer, connected smart TVs provide video-calling options. Or that in recent years companies such as Cisco and Logitech have introduced set-top options for turning your living room TV into a gigantic video phone. Video calls on the TV have barely registered with consumers. Too expensive. Not good enough. Some combination of the two.
Even so, I've always appreciated the idea behind using the TV for video calls. The screen on your TV is likely the largest and best display in your house. And consider how appealing it might be for the entire family to congregate in front of a camera to show off the newborn to out-of-town relatives, rather than having everyone try to crowd in front of a PC's webcam.
Enter Silicon Valley newcomer Tely Labs. With its compact TelyHD Skype-compatible set-top box that recently went on sale, the company believes it can succeed where others have failed. Inside the nearly a foot-long black box is a wide-angle high-definition camera, four noise-canceling microphones, a pretty powerful dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, and Android software. In other words, it has the guts of a computer, which suggests some interesting possibilities down the road.
For now, though, this is mostly about video calling via Skype. In my tests, TelyHD delivered generally acceptable but uneven video quality, even after I swapped one test unit for another. The box is capable of delivering high-definition video up to the 720p standard, though I certainly never mistook the pictures I saw for a supercrisp HD series on network television. You need a robust Internet connection of at least 1 Mbps (upstream and downstream) to achieve...
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